I enjoyed this interview with Tucker discussing several topics we have heard over the years. https://youtu.be/kAaFEOCHE4I

Quote:Seattle, Washington-based aviation technology company Electric Sky has announced a significant breakthrough involving its Whisper Beam power beaming technology.

Funded by the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Whisper Beam is designed to send power wirelessly to vehicles while in flight using only radio waves. Once commercially available, Whisper Beam will be perfectly poised to herald a dramatic shift in how passenger aircraft, flying taxis, drones, and satellites carry and consume the energy that keeps them aloft.

Air Travel Has Changed Very Little in Decades

In an interview with The Debrief, Electric Sky’s CEO and co-founder Robert Millman explained how he and his partner Jeff Greason first stumbled upon the idea of using power beaming to send energy to vehicles while they are in flight as opposed to aircraft needing to bring along all of their fuel with them.

“People today fly at the same speeds their great grandparents flew at,” Millman explained. “In fact, airliners today fly slightly slower than airliners in the 1960s and 1970s.”

The primary limiting factor, he noted, was the need for vehicles to carry all of the fuel they need with them on board in the form of antiquated fossil fuels. And while ground vehicles have finally begun their electric revolution in the last 25 years or so, the dawn of electric flight has yet to take off.

“Electricity is the perfect form of energy in many ways except one; it does not store very well,” said Millman of the primary factor limiting electric flight. “Fossil fuels, on the other hand, are the worst form of energy in many ways except one; they store very well.”

Unfortunately, storage is a huge part of the issue, as current electric aircraft prototypes must fly overly laden with heavy batteries. The limited storage offered by even the most advanced batteries severely limits flight times to mere fractions of those enjoyed by traditional aircraft.

This roadblock has hampered the advancement of electric aircraft and is still the major roadblock in electric vehicles taking flight in any measurable way.

However, Millman says, times are rapidly changing, and technology like power beaming can break that equation, potentially ushering in a whole new era of electrically powered aviation.

Power Beaming for Whisper Beam Built on Established Physics

“The concern we have is flight technology has not advanced very much in the last several decades,” Millman told The Debrief. “So, we were looking to probe known physics and come up with better approaches. And this project, Whisper Beam, is an outcome of that.”

Although the concept sounds right out of science fiction, Millman notes that the idea of power beaming is built upon well-established principles of physics. In fact, he says it was his partner Jeff Greason who, in 2017, noted the solid scientific foundation that radio wave power beaming was built upon regardless of its out-there reputation.

“As much as wireless transmission gets dismissed as fringe, if you look at first principles, it is the right way to go, or at least should be seriously explored,” Millman recalls Greason saying. “The physics of it are pretty well known.”

In short, the technology involves using radio waves to send electric power to an aircraft that is equipped with a specialized receiving antenna, or “rectenna” as Millman called it, that can take that wireless radio wave and turn it into usable electricity. It is a surprisingly simple concept, but even Millman admits that taking something like power beaming from concept to execution with the goal of heralding a major paradigm shift in the way aircraft fly is no small task, regardless of how straightforward it may appear to be.

“We started in earnest in the 2017 timeframe, and we knew we were taking on some rather ambitious things,” Millman told The Debrief. “Let’s just say that changing the nature of flight is no small thing.”



The Type of Power Beam makes All of the Difference

As a first step, Millman and Greason looked at the main existing technology used to send power through the air wirelessly. Known as a Gaussian beam, that technology has a number of significant limitations that make it ill-suited for power beaming to distant aircraft.

First and foremost, Gaussian beams lose power as they go, meaning the farther away an aircraft is from the power station sending it energy, the weaker the beam. This also means that the power generation platform would lose way more energy than ever reaches the aircraft. That would defeat one of the key benefits of power beaming, namely energy efficiency.

Another limiting factor is the dangers associated with Gaussian beams. Specifically, anything that flies between the emitter array and the receiving aircraft would be bombarded with massive amounts of electromagnetic energy. This means that birds, drones, and even other aircraft would be at significant risk every time they fly over a power transfer beam. Combined with the power loss experienced by these types of power beams and the massive amounts of energy required to compensate for that power loss to adequately fuel an aircraft in flight, a Gaussian beam would represent a costly, immediate danger to anything that crosses its path.

“You want to put high power on the vehicle without putting high power on everything in between,” Millman explained. Fortunately, he says, there are types of wireless radio wave beams, known as non-Gaussian beams, that can be custom-shaped so the peak power is at the aircraft and the space between the transmitter and aircraft is a low power zone.

“The way this beam works, it is actually the lowest power directly between the transmitter and the receiver,” Millman told The Debrief.

Of course, he notes, no commercial applications of power beaming with non-Gaussian beams currently exist, but the base technology itself has been around for decades.

“The major issues have been worked out,” Millman said. “The engineering issues, how to turn this into a practical application. Let’s say that there are many solved problems that have been solved over the last 4 or 5 decades, so it’s not like we are solving new stuff.”

For Whisper Beam, Millman says the next practical steps are what he and his team are undertaking now, mainly reducing the non-Gaussian radio wave emitters to a lightweight transmission system that can send the power directly to an aircraft in flight.

“These are all things that have been done, either in the world of radio or wireless communication, that we will apply to our wireless power transmission,” Millman explained. “It’s a mound of work that we look forward to going through.”

Whisper Beam Making Huge Strides Toward Taking Flight

After years of preparation and design, Millman and Greason started to test their ideas in simulation software designed to simulate radio waves and their behaviors. This involved designing and simulating different methods of shaping the non-Gaussian power beams so that they are at their strongest when they reach the aircraft and, conversely, are at their weakest between the emitter array and the receiving aircraft. That work, which Millman notes took them years to complete, was a success.
After that milestone, the duo took the next step of trying to build a proof-of-concept system. The result was their first successful laboratory test in January of 2023.

In that experiment, Millman and Greason and their third team member, technician Tim James, built a customized power-beaming station that features 16 radio wave emitters in a circular array, kind of like a satellite dish array. Then, using the concepts derived from their simulations, this custom power beaming station was able to shape the radio waves, so their peak power not only coalesced at the desired spot but, in this case, was enough to light up a light bulb that had been placed about 3 meters above the transmission array.

“All of the computer simulations predict this is how the waves will behave, but we still wanted to build something physical and then measure them physically to prove that the physical waves are matching the simulations,” Millman told The Debrief. “And they do!”

How Whisper Beam Could Revolutionize Commercial Flight

Throughout the interview, Millman repeatedly emphasized how the higher a plane flies, the more efficient flight can be. For example, a commercial airliner typically cruises between 30 thousand and 40 thousand feet of altitude. This limitation exists in no small part because internal combustion engines need air to generate thrust. Unfortunately for these types of engines, the higher an aircraft goes, the thinner the air they need to create thrust becomes.

The ideal situation, says Millman, is an aircraft that can fly as much as twice as high as current aircraft where the air is thin, allowing for much more efficient travel, especially on long flights. Electric-powered aircraft can do exactly that, allowing for a dramatic reduction in flight times. Still, as previously noted, the types of battery-powered electric vehicles that can take advantage of the thinner atmosphere and lower drag at higher altitudes to reduce flight times have limited power storage. But an electric aircraft that receives power via Whisper Beam doesn’t suffer from this limitation.

“When we take our array designs and transfer them into computer simulations, we can easily transfer power to vehicles flying at 70, 80, 90 thousand feet,” said Millman.

This ability to take advantage of the benefits of high-altitude flight AND electric flight at the same time is the primary driving force behind Electric Sky. It is a goal that attracted DARPA to the program and is one Millman and Greason believe is finally within striking distance.

“If you could pay the same price as a sub-sonic airline but arrive in a quarter of the time, then clearly that’s a better approach,” Millman told The Debrief. “And with zero emissions along the way.”

Emerging Markets May Include Air Taxis or Even Sending Power to Outer Space

Following the success of their light bulb experiments in January, Millman and Greason say they have some attainable, yet admittedly ambitious, goals. One such target is the burgeoning industry of drone-style people carriers, often called air taxis or flying cars.

DARPA wireless powered airplane

Quote:DARPA wants to recharge drones mid-flight with a ‘whisper beam’ of energy (Dec 2021)

"Wireless power transfer provides a potential breakthrough capability."

Have you ever needed to recharge your phone but you’re sitting just a little bit too far from a power outlet? The Department of Defense feels your pain, which is why it put $225,000 into researching how to recharge electric aircraft while they are still in flight.

Called “Whisper Beam,” the budding technology would let electric aerial vehicles “draw kilowatts of power in all weather,” wrote the developer, Electric Sky, Inc., in a press release.

Electric Sky CEO Robert Millman cautioned that DARPA’s interest in Whisper Beam is in the early stages, and the exact military applications of the technology, if any, are yet to be determined. Still, if the technology works and if the military finds use for Whisper Beam, it could be a boon for infantry troops or special operations forces.

For example, the military hopes to use small, affordable drones as eyes in the sky to give service members better intelligence on what’s happening around them, and Whisper Beam could potentially keep those drones flying for longer without interruption.

“Energy is a fundamental currency in the modern battlespace,” Air Force Lt. Col. Paul Calhoun, program manager for this project at DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office, told Task & Purpose. “Developing a more flexible, adaptive, resilient energy ‘web’ by leveraging wireless power transfer provides a potential breakthrough capability for national defense.”

Many military experts are already urging the wide-scale adoption of small reconnaissance drones by ground troops, and developing swarm tactics in large-scale demonstrations. They can provide special operations forces “with a decisive tactical advantage over their adversaries, providing overhead battlespace awareness while manned aerial assets are at standoff distances,” wrote Air Force Capt. Dick Yount in an article for Air University in July [Wild Blue Yonder, eyes in the sky]. “The sooner [Special Operations Command] can regularly field [those drones] the better.”

Of course, a drone is only as useful as its power supply. And if you think it’s inconvenient to have to stand up to plug your phone in, imagine if you’re deep behind enemy lines and your drone dies right when you need to know if there’s an enemy fighter waiting for you around the corner. That’s where Whisper Beam could prove useful. According to the press release, the technology would amplify power the way a whispering gallery amplifies sound.

“Whisper Beam technology is the electromagnetic equivalent of a whispering gallery,” said Millman, CEO of Electric Sky. “In a whispering gallery a single listener across the room can hear the speaker but no one else can, not even people standing directly between the speaker and listener. The sound is too weak for them to hear.” 

Just the same, with Whisper Beam, radio waves would self-focus power at the receiver, but the waves would be weak everywhere else, the press release explained. That means no, unfortunately you won’t be able to throw your phone between the transmitter and the drone in hopes of stealing a few more minutes of battery life.

....

“There are a lot of reasons why the military is interested in electric aircraft, but the military also has a lot of specific requirements, so we don’t want to get too far ahead of our skis,” Millman said.

If we did lean a bit far over the edge, we could see some great opportunities for quieter engine technology. In his 2021 paper, Cap. Dick Yount laid out a scenario where special operators are trying to capture “a weapons facilitator and financier for a violent extremist organization in West Africa.”

The operators have a good idea of where the financier is, but they do not want to bring in larger aircraft like the Reaper or AC-130J gunship for fear of spooking the individual with their loud engine noise, Yount imagined. That, plus low cloud ceilings passing through the target area, severely limits the operators’ “battlespace picture,” Yount wrote, allowing an undetected enemy force to move in and counter friendly troops.

Given 20 years of special operations-centric warfare, enemies of the U.S. “have become savvy to many of our tactics, techniques, and procedures,” Yount explained. “Simply put, if there are airplanes overhead, it’s time to lay low.”

But if you have a small group of quiet, affordable drones, that might give operators the intelligence they need to accomplish the mission. Even today, Army infantry grunts are flying drones to scout objectives for their squads. One of those drones, the Black Hornet Nano, is so small it fits in your hand. According to the manufacturer, the Black Hornet has a flight time of just 25 minutes. Maybe with the Whisper Beam, it could fly a lot longer.

“It’s a myth that long-distance power transmission is impossible, it’s just never been economical,” Whisper-Beam inventor Jeff Greason said. “This new method reduces the cost of the ground transmitter and the size of the vehicle’s onboard receiver.”



In particular, Whisper Beam could help recharge drones after power-hungry phases like take off and climb, which would enable vehicle designers “to meet other requirements to extend range, enhance flight safety, reduce peak loads on batteries, and shorten ground turnaround times,” Greason said.

Even today, Air Force mission planners make similar calculations to try to get heavily-loaded aircraft off the ground and then refueled as soon as possible.

“Sometimes Air Force takeoff weight is a constraining factor on what they can do,” Millman said. “Sometimes they overload aircraft and underload fuel just so they can take off.”

The more range the better, because if there’s anything that the last 20 years of the Global War on Terror have proved, it’s that the longer you have eyes in the sky, the more useful those eyes are.

“With the addition of [remotely piloted aircraft] to the field, SOF teams now rely on constant [intelligence, surveillance reconnaissance] in preparing and executing missions,” wrote Air Force Capt. Jordan Kowalski in a 2017 paper for Air University.

If it is successful, Whisper Beam could have applications beyond the drone world. Greason noted that any electric aircraft can draw power while in flight, so it stands to reason that even manned electric aircraft might benefit from the technology. While most of the Air Force fleet is powered by fossil fuels, the service is looking into manned electric aircraft as part of its Agility Prime program, where the branch hopes to develop manned electric ‘air cars’ capable of vertical takeoff and landing. 

“Possible uses for such aircraft include disaster relief, firefighting, search and rescue, humanitarian aid efforts, medical evacuation, logistics support, and personnel movement,” the Air Force wrote in a press release about Agility Prime.

Still, Millman cautioned that the first step is to test Whisper Beam out for DARPA, and then, based on the test, find out more about what missions DARPA is envisioning for the technology.

We can only hope that if Whisper Beam takes off, it will be renamed ‘Scotty.’ Then, at long last, the old Star Trek command ‘beam me up Scotty,’ can finally become a legitimate military order.

Quote:Rhonda Stevenson - Stevenson also heads the non-profit organization ─ Tau Zero Foundation ─ dedicated to pioneering advancements toward interstellar flight, focusing on the intermediate steps of advanced propulsion and energy storage for on orbit capabilities and beyond. She is the creator and host of the “Space Matters” show, a syndicated weekly digest of space industry activities and relevant conversations.

In 2013, Stevenson founded Blue Elysium Enterprises, which provided strategic executive consulting to technology companies. Earlier in her career, she was chief marketing and promotions officer at Deep Space Industries, and founder of Space Mining and Resources Coalition.

His widow stopped by ATS to tell us of his passing, I am guessing some here knew him.

RIP Cody!!!!!
https://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thr...id26928431

Or Happy Ancient Roman Bacchus Festival. St Patrick's Day, as practiced in the US, is a lot older than St. Patrick.




March 17th is the day generally believed to be the death of St. Patrick, the British-born missionary who is credited with converting Ireland to Christianity. 3/17 is also the date of a Masonically-created holiday, St. Patrick’s Day. The story has it that the holiday was established by high level Freemason, George Washington, allegedly to reward Irish soldiers in the Continental Army. But "St. Paddy's" has traditionally been a very minor Saint’s day in Ireland. Considering that the day has become America's defacto Bacchanal (which takes us back to Osiris) it's worth noting some of the parallels of this day with Solar mythology.

1. Osiris was believed to be the source of barley, which was used for brewing beer in Egypt.

2. It’s customary to wear green on St. Patrick’s Day and Osiris was known as the "Green Man" (No, not the Ukrainian comedian)

3. The root word of Patrick is pater, the Latin word meaning father. Osiris is the father in the Egyptian Trinity.



4. This one might be a surprise to some - St. Patrick's Day was originally celebrated by Protestant Loyalists in the British Army:

Quote:The ritual of the St. Patrick’s Day parade, what later became a manifestation of Irish nationalism and Roman Catholic observance, was actually established in the American colonies by Protestant Irish from Ulster, among whom were British soldiers.

Their first meeting and dinner to honor St. Patrick was an expression of their Protestant faith as well as their intention to bond with fellow Irish émigrés. Their 1775 meeting included British soldiers of Irish extraction. All proceeded, or marched, to the King’s Chapel to hear a sermon devoted to the occasion, and then continued on to a dinner in King Street.

No meetings by the Irish Charitable Society were held after this meeting in 1775 until 1883, because of the interruption of the Revolutionary War. One may guess on the popularity of British soldiers appearing in American St. Patrick’s Day parades after this event.

British soldiers were still the big show of the first St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York City in 1762. The first celebration in New York City was in 1756, at the Crown and Thistle tavern. Philadelphia held its first St. Patrick’s Day parade in 1771.

General George Washington issued a proclamation during the Revolutionary War, declaring March 17, 1780 a holiday for the Continental Army, then stationed in Morristown, New Jersey, in honor of the many soldiers of Irish ancestry and those born in Ireland. It was reported that this was the first holiday granted the troops in two years. Washington’s remark that the proclamation was “as an act of solidarity with the Irish in their fight for independence,” was possibly the origins of St. Patrick’s Day in America as an expression of Irish nationalism as much as Irish heritage or of honoring a Christian saint.

America's Irish Holiday has Protestant and British Roots

Quote:In modern-day Ireland, St. Patrick's Day has traditionally been a religious occasion. In fact, up until the 1970s, Irish laws mandated that pubs be closed on March 17.

Beginning in 1995, however, the Irish government began a national campaign to use St. Patrick's Day as an opportunity to drive tourism and showcase Ireland to the rest of the world. Last year, close to one million people took part in Ireland 's St. Patrick's Festival in Dublin, a multi-day celebration featuring parades, concerts, outdoor theater productions, and fireworks shows.

Quote:
St. Patrick's Day is also frequently a time for drinking. It used to be that this tradition was strung out for at least five days, the so-called seachtain na Gaeilage or "Irish week."

That may stem from Roman times, when March 17 started the festival of the Bacchanalia, a celebration to the deity Bacchus, to whom wine was sacred. In olden years long gone by, the Irish drank mead, made from fermented honey. You might do better today with a stout Guinness, preferably dyed green.

Quote:The bacchanalia were wild and mystic festivals of the Roman and Greek god Bacchus. Introduced into Rome from lower Italy by way of Etruria (c. 200 BC), the bacchanalia were originally held in secret and only attended by women.

The festivals occurred on three days of the year in the grove of Simila near the Aventine Hill, on March 16 and March 17.

Later, admission to the rites was extended to men and celebrations took place five times a month. According to Livy, the extension happened in an era when the leader of the Bacchus cult was Paculla Annia - though it is now believed that some men had participated before that.

Quote:In Egypt, beer was regarded as food. In fact, the old Egyptian hieroglyph for "meal" was a compound of those for "bread" and "beer". This "bread-beer meal" plus a few onions and some dried fish was the standard diet of the common people along the Nile at the time.

Beer came in eight different types in Egypt. Most were made from barley, some from emmer, and many were flavored with ginger or honey. The best beers were brewed to a color as red as human blood. The Egyptians distinguished between the different beers by their alcoholic strength and dominant flavor.

None other than the god of the dead, Osiris, was hailed as the guardian of beer, because to him grain - both emmer and barley - were sacred. The Egyptians believed that grain had sprung spontaneously from Osiris' mummy, as a gift to mankind and as a symbol of life after death.

This was sufficient justification for the god-like pharaohs to turn brewing into a state monopoly and strictly license brewing rights to entrepreneurs and priests. Many temples eventually opened their own breweries and pubs, all in the service of the gods. The port of Pelusium at the mouth of the Nile became a large brewing center, and trading in beer became big business.

Egyptian Beer for the Living, the Dead ... and the Gods

Quote:Ra now realized that Hathor-Sekhmet would destroy the human race completely. Angry as he was he wished to rule mankind, not see it destroyed. There was only one way to stop Hathor-Sekhmet, he had to trick her. He ordered his attendants to brew seven thousand jars of beer and color it red using mandrakes and the blood of those who had been slain. In the morning Ra had his servants take the beer to the place where Hathor would viciously slaughter the remnant of mankind. Ra’s servants poured the beer mixture on the fields. And so, Hathor-Sekhmet came to this place where the beer flooded the fields. Looking down, her gaze was caught by her own reflection, and it pleased her. She drank deeply of the beer, became drunk, fell asleep, and abandoned her blood thirsty quest.
The Legend of Ra and Hathor

Quote:The religion of the Druids, as before said, was the same as the religion of the ancient Egyptians. The priests of Egypt were the professors and teachers of science, and were styled priests of Heliopolis, that is, of the City of the Sun. The Druids in Europe, who were the same order of men, have their name from the Teutonic or ancient German language; the German being anciently called Teutones. The word Druid signifies a wise man. In Persia they were called Magi, which signifies the same thing.
- Thomas Paine, Origin of Freemasonry

Quote:“The Celtic Church in Ireland and in Scotland owed its origin not to Rome, but to Egypt and the East; its customs, traditions, methods, government came from Egypt through Athanasius of Alexandria, Hilary, Martin of Tours, Ninian, and through that religious channel, more than a little independent of Rome. The religious ideas of Egypt came to Scotland and Ireland and were absorbed easily into the tribal life of these countries.. There is no doubt that the Celtic Church owed its ritual, its architecture, its worship and its law to Syria, Egypt and Palestine, and that its allegiance to Rome was slight.”

Quote:This universal illumination of the houses on one night of the year suggests that the festival may have been a commemoration not merely of the dead Osiris but of the dead in general, in other words, that it may have been a night of All Souls.

For it is a widespread belief that the souls of the dead revisit their old homes on one night of the year; and on that solemn occasion people prepare for the reception of the ghosts by laying out food for them to eat, and lighting lamps to guide them on their dark road from and to the grave.

Herodotus, who briefly describes the festival, omits to mention its date, but we can determine it with some probability from other sources. Thus Plutarch tells us that Osiris was murdered on the seventeenth of the month Athyr, and that the Egyptians accordingly observed mournful rites for four days from the seventeenth of Athyr.

As many things from government and supposedly so called experts their opinions are nothing more than another propaganda..

If its not raining that day, we'll go to the moon.

Quote:Government signs £2.9m Moon base nuclear power deal with Rolls-Royce

'Rolls-Royce scientists and engineers are to research how nuclear power could be used to support a future Moon base.
The UK Space Agency has given the Derby-based firm £2.9m to look at ways of powering future lunar settlements.
The company has been asked to demonstrate how nuclear micro reactors could extend the duration of future missions
to the Moon.

They say you don't need an umbrella up there, but we'll see. It's the antigravity tea that bothers me.


The government said the deal would boost the UK's space industry and create skilled jobs.

The UK Space Agency said it wanted to establish a new power source to support systems for communications,
life-support and scientific experiments on the Moon. The agency's chief executive Dr Paul Bate said: "We are
backing technology and capabilities to support ambitious space exploration missions and boost sector growth
across the UK.

"Developing space nuclear power offers a unique chance to support innovative technologies and grow our nuclear,
science and space engineering skills base. "This innovative research by Rolls-Royce could lay the groundwork for
powering continuous human presence on the Moon, while enhancing the wider UK space sector, creating jobs and
generating further investment." Rolls-Royce said it wanted to have a reactor ready to send to the Moon by 2029.

The company will work with the University of Oxford, University of Bangor, University of Brighton, University of
Sheffield's Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) and Nuclear AMRC on the project. The Minister of
State at the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, George Freeman, said: "Space exploration is the
ultimate laboratory for so many of the transformational technologies we need on Earth, from materials to robotics,
nutrition, cleantech and much more.

"As we prepare to see humans return to the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years, we are backing exciting
research like this lunar modular reactor with Rolls-Royce to pioneer new power sources for a lunar base." Director
of future programmes for Rolls-Royce Abi Clayton said: "The new tranche of funding from the UK Space Agency
means so much for the Rolls-Royce Micro-Reactor Programme.

"It will bring us further down the road in making the micro-reactor a reality, with the technology bringing immense
benefits for both space and Earth."...'

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Quote:The Brilliant Inventor Who Made Two of History’s Biggest Mistakes

A century ago, Thomas Midgley Jr. was responsible for two phenomenally destructive innovations. What can we learn from them today?

It was said that Thomas Midgley Jr. had the finest lawn in America. Golf-club chairmen from across the Midwest would visit his estate on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, purely to admire the grounds; the Scott Seed Company eventually put an image of Midgley’s lawn on its letterhead. Midgley cultivated his acres of grass with the same compulsive innovation that characterized his entire career. He installed a wind gauge on the roof that would sound an alarm in his bedroom, alerting him whenever the lawn risked being desiccated by a breeze. Fifty years before the arrival of smart-home devices, Midgley wired up the rotary telephone in his bedroom so that a few spins of the dial would operate the sprinklers.

In the fall of 1940, at age 51, Midgley contracted polio, and the dashing, charismatic inventor soon found himself in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down. At first he took on his disability with the same ingenuity that he applied to maintaining his legendary lawn, analyzing the problem and devising a novel solution to it — in this case, a mechanized harness with pulleys attached to his bed, allowing him to clamber into his wheelchair each morning without assistance. At the time, the contraption seemed emblematic of everything Midgley had stood for in his career as an inventor: determined, innovative thinking that took on a seemingly intractable challenge and somehow found a way around it.

Or at least it seemed like that until the morning of Nov. 2, 1944, when Midgley was found dead in his bedroom. The public was told he had been accidentally strangled to death by his own invention. Privately, his death was ruled a suicide. Either way, the machine he designed had become the instrument of his death.

Midgley was laid to rest as a brilliant American maverick of the first order. Newspapers ran eulogies recounting the heroic inventions he brought into the world, breakthroughs that advanced two of the most important technological revolutions of the age: automobiles and refrigeration. “The world has lost a truly great citizen in Mr. Midgley’s death,” Orville Wright declared. “I have been proud to call him friend.” But the dark story line of Midgley’s demise — the inventor killed by his own invention! — would take an even darker turn in the decades that followed. While The Times praised him as “one of the nation’s outstanding chemists” in its obituary, today Midgley is best known for the terrible consequences of that chemistry, thanks to the stretch of his career from 1922 to 1928, during which he managed to invent leaded gasoline and also develop the first commercial use of the chlorofluorocarbons that would create a hole in the ozone layer.

Midgley did in fact recover from his bout with lead poisoning, but other early participants in the Ethyl business were not so lucky. Days after the first mass-production site for tetraethyl lead opened at DuPont’s Deepwater facility in New Jersey, Midgley and Kettering found themselves responsible for one of the most horrifying chapters in the history of industrial-age atrocities. On the eastern banks of the Delaware River, not far from DuPont’s headquarters in Wilmington, the Deepwater facility already had a long history of industrial accidents, including a series of deadly explosions in its original operational role of manufacturing gunpowder. But as soon as it began producing Ethyl at scale, the factory turned into a madhouse. “Eight workers in the DuPont tetraethyl gas plant at Deep Water, near Penns Grove, N.J., have died in delirium from tetraethyl lead poisoning in 18 months and 300 others have been stricken,” The Times would later write in an investigative report. “One of the early symptoms is a hallucination of winged insects. The victim pauses, perhaps while at work or in a rational conversation, gazes intently at space and snatches at something not there.” Eventually, the victims would descend into violent, self-destructive insanity. One worker threw himself off a ferry in a suicide attempt; another jumped from a hospital window. Many had to be placed in straitjackets or strapped to their beds as they convulsed in abject terror. Before work was halted at the plant, the hallucinations of swarming insects became so widespread that the five-story building where Ethyl was produced was called the “house of butterflies.”

The question of leaded gasoline’s health risks to the general public was a known unknown. The health risk posed by Freon was a more mercurial beast: an unknown unknown.

In his 2015 book, “A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology From Slipping Beyond Our Control,” Wendell Wallach talks about the class of unsettling near-term technologies that generally fit under the umbrella of “playing God”: cloning, gene editing, “curing” death, creating synthetic life-forms. There is something unnervingly godlike in the sheer scale of the impact that Thomas Midgley Jr. had on our environment, but the truth is that his innovations required immense infrastructure, all those Ethyl and Freon factories and gas stations and aerosol cans, to actually bring about that long-term destruction. But today, in an age of artificial replicators, it is much easier to imagine a next-generation Midgley playing God in the lab — with good or evil intent — and dispatching his creations with that most ancient of commands: Go forth, and multiply.

NOTE: I have reposted this thread at ATS from one I posted in Hernando's Hideaway back in 2016 and wanted it here as well.

Although you aren't legally allowed to create a private currency, script and voucher systems can be used as an alternative to out right bartering. Coupons, tokens, vouchers and scripts are legal if they don't look like the official currency or are minted coin from metals. They have been and still are being used like cash in certain communities and there are problems with getting people to use them, but if the government eliminates physical currency, you could go this route on a local or regional basis.

I can see a Bartertown scenario (open air or flea market) where this could work. Exchange goods with intrinsic value for scripts, like say metals, then use the scripts for purchases within the open air market. Any scripts not used could be exchanged for the goods that back the scripts in circulation. Items that have a limited shelf life are normally not used as an exchange commodity. I could see using minted coins, like pre-1981 copper pennies or current nickles, as an exchange commodity. esp. if the government decides to eliminate the penny like they want to eliminate the larger denominations ($100 and $50 bills).

Script


Voucher

Scripts are often used for fundraising activities and many companies offer company scripts, like Disney Dollars and the old timey Green Stamps. There is plenty of historical examples of script and vouchers being used.

There are other private "currencies" like bitcoin, of course that is a cashless deal.

It would be somewhat complex to fix a value to whatever you call your script or vouchers. I suppose that would depend on what was accepted in trade for said vouchers. Services can be exchanged in this way as well, but I imagine that services or commodities that are in the highest demand will be equal to higher value vouchers. If there is a worldwide economic collapse, then runaway inflation would make comparisons to legal tender currencies and metals difficult.

Then there is counterfeiting scripts and vouchers. Perhaps a method of keeping track of serial numbers in addition to watermarks on specially produced paper could do the trick.

It would be complex to do, but it would be like having cash in hand in a local economy. No worrying about runaway inflation, government tracking purchases, getting the Cyprus haircut, or negative interest rates.


Overall, I believe this would be a hard one to pull off with other markets doing business with other forms of exchange. Also, it is always a possibility that if scripts and vouchers become popular, then they will be made illegal even though it's legal at the moment.

Quote:https://lists.youmaker.com/links/Akbx8qw...D7f80wn4yK

Young Pilot Fights Post-Jab Heart Issues, Speaks Out on COVID Shot Fears

Sierra Lund, a recreational pilot, is pictured with a small airplane in 2022. (Courtesy of Sierra Lund.)

By Janice Hisle
March 14, 2023Updated: March 16, 2023
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Sierra Lund, a recreational pilot, shudders to think what could have happened if she had been in the cockpit when she started experiencing heart attack-like symptoms.
Just 18 hours after being injected with a COVID-19 shot, Lund felt intense pain in her chest. She was having trouble breathing. “Walking was a struggle,” she said.
None of this made sense.
Lund was a well-conditioned, competitive athlete. Neither she nor her relatives had any history of heart issues. And she was just 23. So Lund tried to shrug off her symptoms. They didn’t abate, so she sought emergency medical care.
Now, a year and a half later, her symptoms persist.
Lund was diagnosed with two heart conditions: myocarditis (cardiac muscle inflammation) and pericarditis (inflammation of the sac encasing the heart). Studies have linked both conditions to COVID vaccinations, and Lund says she’s sure the jab is to blame for her new health issues.
As a result, Lund can no longer fly a plane solo. Flying has been her passion since she first got her pilot’s license at age 17.
Lund and Josh Yoder, co-founder of aviation advocacy group “US Freedom Flyers,” say many other pilots—including commercial captains—have also suffered health issues that they strongly suspect could have been caused by taking a COVID jab. Yoder’s group has encouraged pilots to get screened specifically for myocarditis, which can remain undetected during routine medical exams.
“A lot of people are afraid to talk about it, afraid to lose their job,” Lund told The Epoch Times. “And since I’m not in that situation, I have a responsibility to speak out.”
Lund is sharing her story, she said, in the hopes of increasing public awareness about the health issue. She is also urging the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and other government officials to look into vaccine-related health risks that could affect pilots more seriously.
Failure to do so is “extremely dangerous for the pilots and for the general public,” Lund said.
‘Zero Doubt’ Vaccine Caused Problems
A large percentage of commercial pilots received the COVID shots after being threatened with losing their jobs if they failed to comply with federal mandates.
Yoder, a commercial pilot, said he has heard from dozens of vaccinated pilots who worry that the shots hurt their health, may be threatening their livelihoods and affecting their ability to fly safely.
“Unfortunately, many of them have been suffering with these issues for quite some time … they were hoping the symptoms would go away,” Yoder told The Epoch Times of conversations he’s had with those in the industry.
He said word had spread that his organization was connecting pilots with medical professionals who could help diagnose and treat their health conditions; US Freedom Flyers connected Lund with doctors who are trying alternative therapies after conventional treatment methods yielded little improvement in her heart conditions.
While proving a link between vaccines and medical conditions can prove elusive, Lund says cases such as hers, which document near-immediate effects after vaccination, are hard to dispute reasonably.
After consulting with four cardiologists and learning about many reports similar to hers, Lund says she has “zero doubt” that the COVID shot caused her heart problems.
After receiving a COVID vaccine in September 2021, Lund felt terrible chest pain and shortness of breath as she headed for a flight as a passenger on a commercial aircraft. She called her father, who had just dropped her off. He headed back to pick her up and took her to an urgent care clinic, where an X-ray showed inflammation in her chest.
Her chest has hurt ever since.
[/url] Vials of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine on a table in a vaccination clinic in San Rafael, Calif., on April 6, 2022. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Lund took the shot voluntarily, mostly because she wanted to take a trip to a foreign destination where the shot was required. She also felt societal pressure to get the vaccine.
She now regrets the decision, which has changed her life dramatically.
As a daughter of a commercial airline pilot who also flies recreationally, aviation has been a constant in her life. Since her diagnosis, Lund still pilots small planes to keep her skills sharp. But she must always have a second pilot accompanying her; she is no longer medically cleared to fly alone.
Lund’s past schedule of daily gym workouts are also in her rear-view mirror—at least for now.
She tries not to think about all that she is missing.
“If I did, I’d probably be depressed,” Lund said. “I’m trying to figure out how to get better and figuring out how to come up with some sort of normal life in the meantime.”
She now runs her own business as an aircraft broker, keeping her in touch with the aviation community that she loves so much.
In between, Lund heads to medical appointments, including some that require travel from her home state, Georgia. She has spent about $15,000 out-of-pocket trying to get well so far.
FAA Decision Puzzling
U.S. government agencies insist that cases such as Lund’s are rare and that the COVID shots are safe and effective for the general public. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has stood by its decision to OK them for pilots’ use.
Lund and others, however, fault the FAA for approving the vaccines for pilots.
“Allowing pilots to put any substance in their body that has not had the appropriate clinical trials and abundant data to back its safety goes directly against what the FAA has always stood for,” Lund wrote in a Jan. 25 email to Federal Air Surgeon Susan Northrup.
The FAA forbids pilots from using numerous substances, including over-the-counter medications, within a certain number of hours before flying.
That’s why the FAA’s willingness to approve the emergency use COVID-19 vaccines for pilots is mystifying, Lund said.
“Instead of advocating for pilots, you allowed mandates to roll out,” Lund told Northrup.
Now, many pilots are vaccinated with the same shot that Lund blames for her predicament.
As of March 13, Lund said she had yet to receive a reply from Northrup.
When the Epoch Times sought comment from Northrup, an FAA spokesman responded on her behalf: “The FAA has seen no credible evidence of aircraft accidents or incapacitations caused by pilots suffering medical complications associated with COVID-19 vaccines.”
U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has been investigating COVID vaccine concerns in aviation.
In a Feb. 10 letter to Johnson, Northrup said that the FAA knew of only four “potentially vaccine-related adverse events in active pilots.”
She also said that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) “is the responsible agency for tracking and follow up of suspected vaccine adverse events”—not the FAA.
Johnson accused the agency of ignoring problems that the COVID shots might be causing among pilots that pose serious risks specific to the airline industry.
Pilots Not ‘Your Average Person’
“I think one thing that the public needs to know is, if they hear of a pilot having a condition, or a heart attack in the cockpit, they aren’t just your average person … I mean, these people go in for extensive medical screenings to keep their jobs,” Lund said. “So these should be the healthiest people out there.”
Yet, at least anecdotally, people seem to be hearing more reports of pilots suffering from heart ailments similar to Lund’s, or worse, Yoder said. This suggests that effects from the COVID shots or the illness itself could be the culprit.
“This is not something that we’ve seen happening on this scale before,” Yoder said. “You never heard about it; it was very rare … Now it’s something we hear about now almost every week.”
Josh Yoder, president of US Freedom Flyers. (Josh Yoder)
Through aviation networks, Yoder has heard numerous reports of flight attendants collapsing at work. Periodically, he has also seen reports of pilots being incapacitated or dying suddenly. Few of the reports in the mainstream press raise the possibility that the COVID vaccine may have been a factor.
Lund said people tend to shy away from talking about anything related to COVID vaccines because it can cause controversy. But she said more open discussion and investigation are needed to protect people’s safety.
Yoder concurs. He worries about undetected cases of cardiac inflammation. With the disclaimer, “I can’t speak as a doctor,” he said that cardiologists were telling him, “The longer you go with severe chronic inflammation, it’s not something that gets better over time. It gets worse.”
“So, left untreated, we’re gonna continue to see these deaths and incapacitations increase, most likely,” Yoder said.
Her Condition ‘Rare,’ Officials Say
In April 2021, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) acknowledged an uptick in cases of myocarditis and pericarditis, especially among adolescents and young males. But the CDC insists these incidents are “rare” and that the benefits of the shots outweigh the risks.
“COVID-19 vaccines have undergone—and will continue to undergo—the most intensive safety monitoring in U.S. history,” the agency says on its website. “Evidence from the hundreds of millions of COVID-19 vaccines already administered in the United States, and the billions of vaccines administered globally, demonstrates that they are safe and effective.”
Data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) show 26,584 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis after COVID vaccinations, according to an analysis on OpenVAERS.com.
Nurse Kimberly Overton, VAERS Whistleblower Deborah Conrad, Dr. Jeffrey Howard, Dr. Reni Moon, and Dr. James Thorp discuss COVID-19 vaccine adverse events in the Mississippi capitol building in 2023. (Courtesy of Charlotte Stringer Photography)
Prior to the availability of the COVID vaccines in the United States, those conditions barely registered on VAERS. But the number of myocarditis and pericarditis reports in VAERS soared to almost 16,000 in 2021—the first full year that the COVID shots were in use.
Lund said her case was submitted to VAERS; it is listed among 3,819 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis for COVID-inoculated people in her age group 12-25. But COVID vaccine recipients in the age group above hers, ages 25-51, recorded the highest number of those heart conditions in VAERS: 5,456.
As of March 3, more than 1.5 million “adverse events” have been reported to VAERS. That’s a fraction of the [url=https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-total-admin-rate-total]270 million people in the United States who have had at least one COVID vaccine, the CDC argues.
But as OpenVAERS, a group that questions vaccine safety, points out: “VAERS is widely acknowledged, even by the CDC, to be vastly underreported.” If that is true, the number of adverse effects of the COVID vaccines could be many times higher than the VAERS data show.
‘Real Solution’ Needed
Lund said she hopes that people on both sides of the political spectrum—and on both sides of the COVID vaccine mandate debate—can look for answers more open-mindedly.
She has heard the vitriol surrounding the issue and finds it unproductive.
“If you are extremely pro-vaccine, don’t blow people off when they say they have had an adverse side effect to the vaccine,” she said. “You need to be more understanding and listen to other people’s experience and listen to the studies that are coming out and maybe try to do some critical thinking as far as what you put into your body.”
It’s wrong for people to label vaccine skeptics “grandma killers” and “conspiracy theorists,” Lund said.
On the other hand, people who are anti-vaccine “need to be more understanding of the pressure that people are under and how scared they were of the pandemic,” and about their willingness to trust the government-appointed experts, Lund said.
“People on both sides of the aisle really need to come together, especially on this front, and just look at it logically based on the facts that we have now,” Lund said.
“It’s a real big issue … But as far as the FAA, I think that they need to start investigating these cases of pilots and people in the aviation world that are getting adverse side effects and come up with a real solution.”